Somewhere in Italy, my Bach-Siloti prelude and rabbits

Speaking of Italy (5 months ago ... I'm a bit behind), I was tickled to find a short video online, somewhere in Italy, using, appropriately enough, a short piece I recorded a couple of years ago when getting my then-new Yamaha. It's a transcription by Siloti -- in 19th Century style, with lute-like bass -- of a prelude by Bach. Romantic in style, it was written for his daughter when she was young. Protty's set of videos that record aspects of lives of rabbits are viewable here (translated to English via Google webpage-translator, and some wonderful photos are here on Robert Ellero's site.

Big election-day factor?

I think the monster,interactive blog-space of Huffington Post was a really important factor in today's elections.  I go there regularly and find good info (and otherwise) from the countless online sites, to pass on to others.  Information normally kept from the public and hard to find is now easily accessible.  It's a fantastic network, with positive energy behind it.  The effectiveness of that site is underestimated and was very much a part of the success seen today in what turned out to be The November Surprise for Bush-Cheney-Rove.  Good one to bookmark.

Thoughts to consider on Election Day

Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence - by Tom Friedman, who cheer-led and supported the Iraq war because he believed in it, saying in a townhill mtg that if he were proved wrong about this "exciting" experiment, "I would go down"... (to which I thought, "No, Tom, young people and this country will go down').  He's a bit upset about how things have been handled.

Extracts:
"What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor and to retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs in Iraq would only maim them for life and not kill them? And what could be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld’s response to criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the army you’ve got — get over it.
. . .
Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has — through sheer incompetence — brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.
. . .
Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq — and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate — it means our country has become a banana republic ..."

As Bechtel Goes - by Paul Krugman

Extracts:
"Bechtel, the giant engineering company, is leaving Iraq. Its mission — to rebuild power, water and sewage plants — wasn’t accomplished: Baghdad received less than six hours a day of electricity last month, and much of Iraq’s population lives with untreated sewage and without clean water. But Bechtel, having received $2.3 billion of taxpayers’ money and having lost the lives of 52 employees, has come to the end of its last government contract.

As Bechtel goes, so goes the whole reconstruction effort.
. . . if we’ve given up on rebuilding Iraq, what are our troops dying for?
. . . I don’t know whether the administration is afraid to ask U.S. voters for more money, or simply considers the situation hopeless. Either way, the United States has accepted defeat on reconstruction.
    Yet Americans are still fighting and dying in Iraq. For what? "